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Brand Stinking New

The car I’ve had in the back of my mind every time I thought about buying a car within the last four years.

Enter Toothless, our brand new 2014 Ford Fusion.

Yes, I went outside the box with this one. Usually we give cars feminine names, but after a friend mentioned how much she looked like Toothless the dragon – I couldn’t get it out of my mind every time I looked at the car.

She’s definitely Toothless (ignore the fact that Toothless in the movie is a boy – I mean, I’m a Jaye, so I can have a Toothless girl car)

It’s uncanny

Right, RIGHT?!

So anyways, back to buying the car.

Let me just be clear, I hate car buying. Back in 2011 we bought a VW Jetta and had an amazing experience. So naturally I was concerned that our luck would run out and this experience would be anything but fun.

We left Saturday morning with a clear plan to buy a Honda CR-V. For no particular reason other than that it seemed practical. But I requested that we first stop and just check out my muse.

We hit up Ford nice and early, test drove a Fusion SE. Both The Hubs and I had a moment of “this is totally the car for us.” But it was pricey, and we were very committed to looking into the CR-V. In typical car salesman fashion, our salesperson and his manager tried to get us to buy the car right then and there. After fifteen hundred “no we want to keep looking, we’ll be in contact”‘s and a ridiculous offer to give us almost $9K on our trade in (which was worth MAYBE $1K) later, we walked out, telling them that we would be back, most likely, and they should find me THAT car (the SE) in a different colour (the one they had was red) and we’d talk.

Then we hit up Honda and got right down to business. And I just wasn’t impressed. But I tried to convince myself because it was the more practical option – more room for a family, amazing safety ratings, HONDA – that if we could get the model we wanted down to $26K we would consider it. Give it to my husband to completely trip up our salesguy at Honda with the following exchange –

Salesguy – “Okay, so here is our quote for the vehicle you just saw. ”

The Hubs and I review the quote, noticing that they quoted us MSRP.

The Hubs – “Well, we were really hoping for something more in the family of $25-26K.”

Salesguy – “You say your range is $25-26K? A $25K car is the base model, not the luxury model you asked to see”

The Hubs – “True, but we don’t want a base model.”

Salesguy – “Uhh, well I could see if maybe my manager could give you another thousand on the trade in?” (keep in mind that this would bring the trade in value to $3K, which was $6K less than the RIDICULOUS value Ford had just given us)

After a bit more dialogue, I just wasn’t feeling it, and The Hubs was the same. Honda was definitely not catching our drift. They wanted us to buy the $25K car for $25K and the $29K car for $29K….which in negotiator speak means NO DEAL.

We walked out both agreeing that the Fusion was the car for us. So excitedly, we marched right back to Ford and found our salesguy to see if they’d found us our car in a different colour.

It turned out that apparently Ford Fusions are a super hot commodity right now, and the inventory around the entire city is low. So after running through all of the options which didn’t equal us getting exactly what we wanted, our salesguy came out and asked us if we would consider a black Titanium that they had outside.

The Hubs – “Well, that will be more expensive right?”

Salesguy – “Yes, that car is a few thousand more”

The Hubs – “We’ll buy the Titanium for $500 more than we agreed on the SE”

And off the salesguy went. Ten minutes later he was back, with an out the door price that was barely less than the initial quote. This went back and forth for a few hours. Apparently all of the sales managers were furious with us – I mean, they were agreeing to give us almost $9K on a car that they could sell at auction for maybe $1K. But we held strong – the only reason we were even sitting here haggling about the Titanium version was because they couldn’t get us the one we wanted. Not our problem. We had options, we could go somewhere else. Heck, we could buy the Honda.

After a few hours The Hubs and I had a serious talk. We decided that if they could split the difference, we would raise budget by $750.

So, I flagged over our salesguy and wrote down a number.

And that my friends, was that.

After six hours in a car dealership, and a lot of stubborn indifference on The Hubs’ part, we bought more than my dream car – ridiculously below MSRP and less than $1K over budget from what we had agreed to for a much less equipped model.

Toothless is home!

Moral of the story? Maybe we went a bit over budget – but we got a hell of a lot more car than I would have ever dreamed. And we are SO HAPPY with it. It is a beautiful machine.

A dealers price is never their price. There is always room for haggling!